I Guess I’ll Have to Blast My Way Out
This column originally appeared in our Southern Art & Architecture Issue, Fall 2005 (#51).
A whirlwind in the person of a modern-day folk artist.
A guiding principle for me in helping to put together this magazine is to embrace or follow my ignorance. Maybe you already noticed that. But what I really mean is that rather than relying on the little I think I know—and then clearing my throat and imparting that "knowledge" as if from on high—I prefer exploring (this magazine's editorial mission is, after all, to explore the American South). Exploring means that you are open—eager—to discover what you don't already know.
For me, satisfaction with what I know is the same as stagnation, and stagnation is death. The shock of the new, on the other hand, is like birth or rebirth, and the movement one feels in the creaking open or fluid expansion of one's worldview seems crucial to living well. I think I can provide an example from last month when we visited Nashville for the Southern Festival of Books—always a wonderful event, by the way. At one point, I greeted a poet we've published in the magazine, but whom I'd never met. His response: "Good to meet you, Marc. Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to sit you down for a few minutes"—and he nodded to a nearby bench. He wasn't rude in this request but forceful, and as I took a seat, I thought I was in for a scolding of some kind. (Not enough Surrealists in the poetry department?) Instead, he started talking about a musician. "There's this guy you've really got to consider for the Music Issue," the poet said, and went on to describe a richly talented recording artist. The kicker was I'd never heard of the guy—me, who claims to be versed in pop, country, folk, blues, and rock & roll, the genres this musician played.
I'd already come into town with a list of artists to look for in Nashville's great used-record shops but, thanks to the poet, here was a new name. And, as fate would have it, I unearthed two LPs by the musician (both cost $4.99; one was still sealed in plastic). Back home, I didn't get past the first song—I kid you not—before understanding that the music was as groovy as the poet had claimed. I'm now hopeful that the forgotten country artist/folk rocker will appear on next year's OA CD.
I mention all this in order to remove from my shoulders the burden of saying anything insightful, in this space, about Art. Ha! Art is among the many subjects in which I am embarrassingly deficient. In fact, this past December, when I compiled a list of "Things I Will Learn More About in the New Year," Art was at the top.
It might be unnerving that somebody who is contributing to an Art Issue would know little about the subject, but I hope the Nashville example shows how we work around here: We seek out—or bump into—experts and enthusiasts, and we take heed of what we learn. Of course, I hope we add something to the mix—sublime taste, passion, surprising or thoughtful interpretations, what have you.
Because of the we-pursue-our-ignorance argument, my stance in this editorial was going to be, I don't need to be a stinkin' Art Expert and you can't make me! Then it hit me: the realization that I have more art experience in one regard than the vast majority of our readers and even than most art historians. That is because I spent a chunk of my youth living with an utterly original Southern folk artist who is so intense, indefatigable, and, what the hell (he'll smite me for this), clumsy that I am still spinning from the memory, more than a decade later.
The folk artist in question is named Jimmy (J.E.) Pitts, and he also operates as this magazine's poetry editor. Pitts the folk artist is a whacked-out, irrepressible, upside-down visionary. His paintings of zombies, ghosts, country politicians, robots, hillbilly musicians, dinosaurs, trick-or-treaters, astronauts, priests, roller-coasters, and distorted cows and dogs have the magic to transport witnesses—suddenly, and by the seat of our pants—to a time and perspective when those subjects held us in thrall, or real fear. With a tantalizing, supernatural directness, his pictures beckon us to a world we have almost entirely abandoned.
Pitts's paintings lack technical sophistication, so their surface simplicity can keep some people at a remove. My theory is that when you face a Pitts creation you have to give in to what you are feeling, versus feeling guilty that such "simple" work might be affecting you. Yes, his characters may be barely fleshed-out stick figures but...but there is...something...to them. I'm sure of it!
The first art I truly loved, as an adult, was James Thurber's, so maybe I'm preconditioned for this kind of work. In a few smooth, seemingly casual lines, Thurber revealed nuanced characters, which is what Pitts does: No matter how stick-figurish a Pitts character may be, each shows, defiantly and uncannily, real personality. When you think of the technically superior artists who, for all their pyrotechnics and schooling, can't probe as deeply as a Pitts or Thurber, you begin to sense the true caliber of this gift. Showing the inside of people—not a bad trick if you can do it.
Pitts both struggles with his limitations and uses them to good effect. Can't paint hands? Forgets to give necks to his people? Misshapes their heads? Gives them legs and arms that are shorter or longer than they should be? Fine, fine, fine. Rather than realistic details (I've heard him exclaim, in true anguish, "I wish I could draw hands!" and "I wish I could draw perspective!"), Pitts provides sudden access to the distraught or jubilant souls of his bizarrely lifelike characters.
I've certainly heard viewers deride the work of J.E. Pitts. The common sentiment among his critics is, "My five-year-old can paint like that." But is it not possible that when you stop seeing and painting like a five-year-old you lose a valuable capacity? (Pitts responds to this criticism with more pinch: "If your five-year-old can paint like me, then why don't you pull him out of kindergarten and slap a brush in his hand?") In channeling a "childlike" directness, Pitts and similar artists tap into a power source and a way of perceiving that age and "sophistication" diminishes rather than emboldens.
A lot of his titles twist, or add to, the meaning of his work, which I don't often experience with other paintings. Probably this has to do with Pitts's day job as a rather loose-canon poet. He needs language as well as a brush to accurately convey his peculiar vision. Some of his titles include: THE KING IS MAD AGAIN; AMERICAN ROCKET; I GUESS I'LL HAVE TO BLAST MY WAY OUT (CORNERED); MODERN SCARECROW; MISTER, YOU'RE IN THE WRONG PART OF TOWN; THE POPE AND LITTLE DEVIL GO TRICK OR TREATING; WAR BRINGS OUT THE WORST IN PEOPLE; I CAN BLEND IN; THIS WORLD IS FULL OF SNAKES; GHOST SUB(MARINE).
I first met Jimmy in Oxford, Mississippi, in the late '80s, when he was a skinny lad with red-brown hair that tended to stand up and ears that protruded—he looked like a barely postadolescent Tom Sawyer. Jimmy was fidgety, and now, in writing this, I recall how his hands frequently pulsated and how he picked at his nails so often that sometimes he eviscerated them. To some of us, Pitts is propelled by a mysterious energy force—and the fidgety hands and the nail-picking were manifestations of that force.
I don't remember when I first noticed his "energy," but I got proof of it soon after we, two paupers, decided to share an apartment in Oxford. Jimmy had a singular talent for breaking stuff. It was as if a current went through him that he couldn't control. During my time with him, he ended up breaking two or three typewriters, a guitar, alarm clocks, an antique ice-cream scooper (hard metal), the mail slot on the front door, both of the shower knobs, a TV, a stereo, a couple of lamps, etc. I once met a boss of his, the owner of a Chinese restaurant who, in response to my question about how Jimmy was faring as a waiter, said, "Jimmy very good. But he break too much! He break too much!" (At this same restaurant I myself witnessed Jimmy knock over a serving tray.)
There are many unbelievable examples of Pitts's energy in action. Three different times cars exploded on him while he was driving (he never oiled his cars, but there seemed something more to all the smoke and fire than mere mechanics). A girl told me that when Jimmy was driving her car one of the front lights just bounced out onto the highway. The most ridiculous example occurred after a neighbor loaned Jimmy a VW bus. You know how those buses have long, horizontal passenger doors that slide open and shut? When Jimmy returned the bus, the glass was completely missing from the sliding door. He claimed it had just popped out while he was driving home.
Well, enough of this. Pitts won't like it (and I've only scratched the surface). But for us on the outside, this energy force, or whatever it should be called, is directly related to the alarming immediacy one experiences in a Pitts painting. There is no border, no subterfuge, between what is painted and the experience.
When I first met Jimmy, he didn't paint. But he doodled like a madman. While we were residing in the same apartment, he had this weird habit—one of many, really—of sending me postcards through the mail. Often the message would be nothing more than a line: "I will defeat you at chess Wed. night" or braggadocio about the future ("When I am finally recognized as a genius, you will regret having mocked me!"). The backs of the postcards would be transformed into alien landscapes by felt-tip spacemen, splashy colors, intricate designs, cross-eyed animals, etc. In fact, our pad was in a constant state of deluge from Pitts's paperwork and pen. He generated mounds of paper—lists, chess scores, song lyrics, journal entries, poems, stories, letters to girlfriends, challenges to duels—and every scrap was drawn on.
He now claims it was I who kept at him to take up painting. If that's true, my advice came about because the doodling kept surprising and delighting me. After a while, you can't deny vitality like that (or the ceaselessness). I mean, if a TV cartoon, or a pop song, keeps surprising and delighting you, it's good. You may not want to be the kind of guy who likes SPEED RACER or a song by the Captain and Tennille, but at some point you have to accept your joy, if only as a guilty pleasure—at least until you recall the wisdom of the philosopher who said there are no guilty pleasures, only pleasures.
Some will say that to be a Southern folk artist you have to be old, black, uneducated, and poor (exceptions are made for elderly, rural Caucasians with zealous religious streaks). But Pitts, a thirtyish, middle-class, college-educated white boy, forces us to redefine the category. In the end, he's as legitimate as any of them, because, like them, he's untrained and, like them, nothing stops him (the two dominant parallels among all folk artists, I'd argue). All Pitts does is paint and paint and paint and paint.
After I moved out of the apartment, I'd drop by and inevitably locate Pitts in his kitchen, which had been transformed into a studio. Forever more, this nook was over-populated with canvases or whatever he could paint on ("any flat surface"): wood panels, shingles, aluminum siding, ironing boards(!), discarded windows and mirrors, abandoned doors and chalkboards, any kind of cardboard, including the insides of cereal boxes—you name it. Some of the media he used to paint with: oil, acrylic, watercolor, pastel, melted crayons, candle wax, colored pencils, leaves (?), felt-tip pens, charcoal briquettes ("the kind you usually grill with"), etc.
Despite the faux cockiness, there was no expectation, really, of an audience; he was first and foremost painting for himself. If read a certain way, you can even detect this in a recent e-mail of his:
Whatever genius is, I am that thing. If I had clicked with music like I did with art, I'd have a few Grammys by now. If I had clicked with football, I would have won the Heisman. I just happened to click with art.
Get beyond the genius, Grammy, and Heisman talk, and it's all about seeking the "click." Needing the "click."
Sometimes the paintings would be terrible, but this hit-or-miss quality added to the adventure of artistic abandon.
His creations are now getting around. In Vicksburg, Mississippi, a gallery called The Attic has sold hundreds of his paintings (being fidgety probably also helps in being prolific). The movie director Robert Altman owns a Pitts, as does the country singer Marty Stuart.
I know many people who at first didn't like his paintings but who grew to love them. One young lady, an editor in our Oxford office, used to be annoyed by the Pitts paintings in the hallway. But before slipping away to a job in New York, she tried to make off with an untitled group portrait of eight "goons," which I had purchased directly from the artist. Jimmy loves praise, so when Bess told him she wanted my goons, he simply signed it over to her. Following a tug-of-war, the painting landed in our Conway office—albeit with a prominent new inscription: "To Bess: The Best! Jimmy Pitts."
No lone observer can properly convey Jimmy Pitts the person. Even though I'll always claim to be the first to have noted and studied his zany originality, there are now legions of people who collect and swap stories about him, including Annie, his wife.
A fairly typical e-mail from Annie: "Last weekend we went to see the film SIDEWAYS, and Jimmy bought an enormous tub of popcorn...and of course just a few minutes into the film, he knocked over the tub of popcorn with his elbow and it went all over the floor. And with everyone around us trying to watch the film, Jimmy was scraping popcorn off the floor and rustling around with the big tub....making all kinds of noise. It was classic Jimmy Pitts."
I would need many more pages to get this part of his personality on record, so that must be left to his biographer. But I do think Pitts's habit of not overthinking what he's about to do—and instead just doing or saying it—complements his art. It's that "immediacy" factor again.
One time I tried introducing Jimmy to a new batch of OA interns at a local tavern. (Jimmy ended up writing and home-recording a song about them. In fact, he's home-recorded songs about two different groups of OA interns. His music is like his painting.) So I said: "This is Jimmy Pitts, our poetry editor. In addition to that, though, he is a poet himself, and a painter, and a singer/songwriter, a chess player, a journalist, a short-story writer, a philosopher, a chef, a philanthropist, an inventor, a paranormalist, a literary critic, a bookseller, an amateur detective, and a college student." I remember the dazed look on the faces of the new interns. On first meeting him, it's not quite clear how to take him. But, for his part, and as is his wont, the moment did not slip by Jimmy Pitts. "You forgot 'athlete,'" he said.
ALL ART BY J.E. PITTS
